Adding Wasabi Storage to Hammerspace

Overview

This technical reference illustrates how to successfully move existing data from on-premises storage to Wasabi Cloud. Data migration with Hammerspace is completely non-disruptive and transparent to applications and end-users. This is vitally important for the modern and geographically distributed enterprise. Moving data into Cloud with Hammerspace is distinctly different from disruptive legacy data migration solutions that often lead to additional silos and lost productivity. Moving data between volumes, storage systems, data centers, and clouds is a requirement for the modern enterprise to operate efficiently.

Architecture

The topology diagram below illustrates a simple standalone Hammerspace deployment with on-premises storage, end-users, and Wasabi Cloud. Hammerspace provides multiprotocol access to applications and end-users through SMB and NFS. A CSI driver is also provided for Kubernetes.

Configuration

Let’s begin by looking at the prerequisites and steps involved.

Prerequisites

• Anvil metadata node installed.
• DSX data node installed.
• One or more Hammerspace shares.
• On-Premises storage system added to Hammerspace.
• Wasabi account credentials.
• A Wasabi bucket available for use.

Adding Wasabi to Hammerspace

Log into the Hammerspace Management GUI by pointing your web browser to the IP address of the Anvil metadata node. Hammerspace will automatically redirect to HTTPS and TCP port 8443 if not entered. For example:

https://10.200.79.52:8443

Log into the Admin GUI by providing the following:
Username: admin
Password: user–configured during the initial setup

Click the highlighted icon for “Infrastructure” in the left navigation pane.
Select the “Storage Systems” tab.

Click the “Add Storage System” button.
Fill out the form fields in the configuration window.
- Provide a meaningful name
- Type: select Wasabi Cloud Storage from the dropdown menu.
- Access Key: obtain from your Wasabi account.
- Secret Key: obtain from your Wasabi account.
- Endpoint: obtain from your Wasabi account, or from the following Wasabi knowledgebase article.
- Trust self-signed certificates: optional
- Use virtual host bucket signing: optional
- Use V4 auth signing: Leave empty!
- Proxy Host: optional
- Proxy Host: optional
Click “Add Storage System” to finalize the configuration and kick off the process.

Create a Volume

Next, let’s create a volume we can use for storing and sharing data.

Navigate to “Infrastructure” from the left navigation pane.
Select the “Storage Systems” tab.
Click the “+ Volume” button in the column listing Wasabi.
Follow the steps when the wizard opens (shown below).

Select the checkbox(es) for the Wasabi bucket(s) you wish to add to Hammerspace. We are adding a single bucket in this example, but it is just as easy to add multiple buckets.
Click “Next Step>“

IMPORTANT: Do not check the “Shared Volume” checkbox. This must be empty unless creating a Hammerspace Global File System. This is a separate topic covered in other Hammerspace documentation. This can be done at any time before or after adding storage to Hammerspace. Please contact Hammerspace for additional resources if you are configuring a Global File System.

Note that the “+ Volume” button has disappeared, indicating that the volume has been created.
The new volume is ready for use!

Create a Share

This is an optional step that illustrates how to create a multiprotocol share with the SMB and NFS. We could just as easily leverage an existing share for our example.

From the left navigation pane, select the “Shares” icon.
Click the “Create Share” button.

The “Create Share” configuration window will open

From the “Share Details” tab fill out the following information:
- Name: Provide a name for the SMB
- NFS Export Path: automatically filled out (from the “Name” form field above).
- Max Share Size: Set the desired maximum size for the share.
- Alert Threshold: Set a percentage of capacity trigger for alerting (soft quota).
At this point, we can either select “Create” to provision fully-functional multiprotocol SMB and NFS access to end-users and applications, or choose to configure additional options in the other tabs.

Select the “NFS” tab to view or edit additional configuration options. These are standard NFS configuration options, including:
- Export Subnet
- Permissions
- Root Squash
- Secure Port
Click “Update” if making changes.
Next, let’s look at the additional SMB configuration options.

This tab allows us to configure:
- SMB Aliasing. NOTE: The name must be unique across all shares.
- SMB Alias Path (relative to the root of the share). NOTE: Must begin with a forward slash (“/”).
- Whether or not to make the Share browsable (checked by default).
Click “Update” if making changes (optional).
Select “Close” to finalize the share configuration.

NOTE: We will look closer at Objectives in the next step. Snapshot Schedules and Global File System configurations are treated in detail in additional documentation which can be obtained by contacting Hammerspace.

Migrate Data to Wasabi Non-Disruptively

Hammerspace has a unique and very powerful ability to move data between volumes, storage systems, sites, and clouds non-disruptively. This is completely different from legacy data migration that requires service windows and disruptive downtime. Moving data with Hammerspace is live data mobility with zero interruptions to applications, end-users, and services. Uptime remains 100% while moving data from point-to-point or point-to-multipoint with Hammerspace Live Data Mobility. Let’s return to our Share configuration in the Hammerspace Admin GUI.

Select the “Objectives” tab.
Click “Add Objective”.
Select “place-on-My-Wasabi” from the Objective dropdown menu.
Click “Add” to apply the Objective.
Click “Close”.

Next, we will validate that data placement is aligned with the Objective.

NOTE: The Objective will move data non-disruptively from on-premises storage to Wasabi Cloud. The name “My-Wasabi” was chosen in the section “Adding Wasabi to Hammerspace”. This name will vary depending on your configuration choices.

Validate Successful Data Placement

The final step is to validate the data movement to Wasabi. To accomplish that we turn to something we call alignment. This is the term used to describe when data conforms with an applied Objective. An orange-colored bar illustrates that data is moving from one storage target to another (shown in the image below). We can view this by navigating to “Shares” from the navigation pane on the left.

By mousing over the Active Objectives column and the row with our target share, the highlighted information displays, showing that our Objective has been applied.

For additional detail, we can click Share itself and browse subfolders and files. The green color in the Alignment column tells us that the data has been aligned with its Objective. In other words, data has been moved to its declared destination (“place-on-My-Wasabi”).

This concludes the configuration section. We will demonstrate how to access the system through NFS and SMB from various endpoint clients in a subsequent blog.

Summary

In this blog we have provided an overview of the architecture and configuration of Hammerspace Cloud File Migration with Wasabi. Each configuration step has been outlined in detail with the available options. Finally, we have shown how to create desired business outcomes with powerful and easy-to-use Hammerspace Objectives. In the future, we will walk through how to access the multiprotocol front-end interface through SMB and NFS from Windows, MacOS, and Linux clients.